[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction
May 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: _Murt's Virus was catastrophically lethal, but it killed in a
way no disease had ever thought of--it loved its victims to death!_]
Love came somewhat late to Dr. Sylvester Murt. In fact, it took the
epidemic of 1961 to break down his resistance. A great many people fell
in love that year--just about every other person you talked to--so no
one thought much about Dr. Murt's particular distress, except a fellow
victim who was directly involved in this case.
High Dawn Hospital, where 38-year-old Dr. Murt was resident pathologist,
was not the first medical institution to take note of the "plague." The
symptoms first came to the attention of the general practitioners, then
to the little clinics where the G. P.s sent their patients. But long
before anything medical was done about it, the plague was sweeping North
and South America and infiltrating every continent and island in the
world.
Murt's assistant, Dr. Phyllis Sutton, spotted the first irregularity in
the _Times_ one morning and mentioned it to him. They were having coffee
in Murt's private office-lab, after completing reports on two rush
biopsies.
She looked up from the editorial page and remarked, "You know, someone
should do a research on the pathology of pantie raids."
* * * * *
Murt spooned sugar into his mug of coffee and stared at her. In their
six months' association, it was the first facetious remark she had made
in his presence. To this moment, he had held an increasing regard for
her quiet efficiency, sobriety, professional dignity and decorum. True,
she wore her white coat more tightly belted than was necessary and,
likewise, she refused to wear the very low hospital heels that thickened
feminine ankles. But she wore a minimum of come-hither in both her
cosmetic and personality makeup. This startling remark, then, was most
unexpected.
"Pantie raids?" he inquired. "Whatever would justify an inquiry into
such a patently behavioristic problem?"
"The epidemic nature and its increasing virulence," she replied soberly.
"This spring, the thing has gotten out of hand, according to this
editorial. A harmless tradition at a few of the more uninhibited
campuses has turned into a national collegiate phenomenon. And now
secondary effects are turning up. Instructors say that intramural
romance is turning the halls of ivy into amatory rendezvous."
Murt sipped his coffee and said, "Be thankful you aren't a psychiatrist.
Bacterial mutations are enough of a problem, without pondering
unpredictable emotional disturbances."
His assistant pursued it further. "It says the classrooms are emptying
into the marriage bureaus, and graduation exercises this year will be a
mockery if something isn't done. What's more, statistics show a
startling increase in marriages at the high school level."
Murt shrugged broad shoulders that were slightly bent from long hours
over a microscope. "Then be thankful you aren't an overworked
obstetrician," he offered as an amendment.
She glanced up from the paper, with annoyance showing in her dark,
well-spaced eyes. "Is it of no interest to you that several hundred
thousand youngsters are leaving high school and college prematurely
because they can't control their glands?"
"Be glad, then," Murt said coldly, "that you aren't an
endocrinologist--now drink your coffee. I hear the microtome working.
We'll have some business in a minute."
Dr. Phyllis Sutton rustled the pages of the _Times_ together, folded it
up and threw it at the wastebasket with more vigor than was necessary.
The subject was momentarily closed.
* * * * *
His staff position at High Dawn paid less, but the life suited Dr. Murt
better than the hectic, though lucrative, private practices of many of
his colleagues. He arrived at the hospital early, seven o'clock each
day, to be on hand for quick tissue examinations during the morning
operations. By ten, the biopsies were usually out of the way, and he
spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon checking material from
the bacteriology section and studying post-operative dissections of
tumorous tissues and organs removed in surgery.
It was engrossing, important work, and it could be accomplished in a
normal work-day, leaving the pathologist considerable leisure to study,
read and relax. Shortly after the pantie-raid conversation with Phyllis
Sutton, he found the evening paper attracting more than his usual quick
perusal.
This emotional fuss in the young human animal was beginning to preoccupy
the newspaper world. Writers were raising their eyebrows and a new crop
of metaphors at the statistics, which they described variously as
alarming, encouraging, disheartening, provocative, distressing, romantic
or revolting, depending upon the mood and point of view.
As June, the traditional mating month, wore into July, national
statistics were assembled to reveal that marriages were occurring at
almost double the highest previous rate, that the trend was accelerating
rather than diminishing.
Jewelers and wholesale diamond merchants chalked up fabulous increases
in the sale of engagement and wedding settings. Clergymen and qualified
public officials were swamped with requests for religious and civil
marriage ceremonies.
Parks, beaches and drive-in theaters were jammed with mooning and/or
honeymooning couples, and amusement parks began expanding their
over-patronized tunnel-of-love facilities.
The boom in houses, furniture, appliances and TV was on, and last year's
glut of consumer goods for the home was rapidly turning into a shortage.
All was not good news, however. The divorce courts reported their
calendars stacked months ahead of time, and an increasing number of
lurid headlines were devoted to the love-triangular troubles of the
rich, famous and notorious. Love-nest exposés and bigamous marriages
rocketed in number.
The whole world, adolescent and adult, was falling in love, with the
inevitable unrequited infatuations, the jealousies, infidelities and the
bitter-sweetness of wholesale, illicit, impossible love situations in
which vulnerable people found themselves increasing astronomically.
Writers of popular newspaper psychology columns attributed the rampaging
emotional fire to everything from mass-hysteria, caused by sunspots, to
the paternalism of a government that gave increased income-tax
deductions to married people.
* * * * *
Dr. Murt's growing interest was not entirely academic. His bachelorhood
was no accident of fate, but rather a carefully contrived independence,
for which he paid the price of eternal vigilance. As the world supply of
eligible bachelors diminished sharply, his wariness increased, and he
became more and more curt with nurses and female technicians at the
hospital.
He revealed the depth of his leeriness one afternoon at the scrub-up
sink, where he and his assistant were washing after a messy dissection.
Phyllis Sutton remarked, "Holly, down in Personnel, showed me a
tabulation she ran off for her own curiosity today, Doctor. Do you
realize that in this whole hospital there are only _eight_ unmarried
female employees?"
Murt threw water droplets from his bare arms and muttered, "Yes, and
every one of them's giving me the eye--to say nothing of half the
married ones."
His aide dried her long arms and slender hands and looked at him with a
crooked smile. "Not to underestimate your good looks, Doctor, but I am
one of the unmarried females. I trust I'm not giving you too much
trouble?"
He looked up, startled. "Yes--no, _no_--of course not. I'm referring to
the nurses and the technicians. What's got into them? The whole lot
seems to be on the make!"
Phyllis combed out her short dark hair and looked at him in the mirror.
"I assure you the males are just as bad. These interns and four of the
male nurses give me a physical with their eyes every time I happen to
meet them."
"I suppose this ties in somehow with your pantie-raid theory."
"Well, what do _you_ think?"
"I don't think. I just dodge. You'd do well to do the same," Murt told
her, putting on his jacket and adjusting his tie.
She sat down in his oak swivel-chair and crossed her slender ankles.
"Are you aware of the problem they have downstairs in the out-patient
clinic?"
"Hadn't heard," Murt said.
* * * * *
She removed a file from her purse and touched up her short nails. "The
outlying clinics are sending their overflow to us. They can't seem to
diagnose the odd symptoms they're getting."
"I had noticed the large number of negative test results coming out of
the lab," Murt acknowledged. "Haven't followed any of them through,
though."
"I have," Phyllis said with a little frown. "Seems to be a psychosomatic
nightmare down there."
"What are the symptoms?"
"Mostly neurotic," she said. "Listlessness, loss of appetite,
palpitations, cold sweats and absent-mindedness."
"Why don't they go to the psychiatric clinics?"
"Overloaded. They're sending patients here."
"What age groups?"
"From puberty to senility. I'd like your permission to do a little
special work on blood samples."
"Another theory?" he asked caustically.
"Yes. Will you give me your permission to test it?"
Murt adjusted his Panama straw in the mirror and noticed that the
nostrils of his straight nose were flared for some reason. "Your time is
your own after three P. M. every day. If you want to take time out from
your thesis research, that's your business."
He crossed to the door and was opening it when he became aware that he
had had no answer. He looked back at the profile of his assistant's
body, which was now stretched out full length, suspended at three
points--her higher-than-practical heels on the linoleum tile, her spine
and curved hips using only an inch of the chair's edge, and her head
tilted over the chair's back. She inhaled from a king-size filter-tip
cigarette and blew a feather of smoke at the ceiling.
"_Yuh!_" she said finally. Her flat abdomen jumped at the exhaled
syllable, and so did her generous breasts under the soft emerald-green
street dress.
"Good _night_!" Murt closed the door behind him quickly and became aware
of a sharp stab of what he defined as pure rut--the first he had
suffered in fifteen years.